Abram games graphic artist

Follow Us. Browse Projects Click on an image to view more from each project. His father's use of an aerograph or airbrush to retouch photographs would have a strong effect on Abram's style of design. Inspired by the posters he saw in railway stations and hoardings, he aimed to create a new style: "I wind the spring and the public, in looking at the poster, will have that spring released in its mind.

You have to involve the viewer in your thought processes. There will be an inevitable association between image and advertiser.

Lettering, to be kept to a minimum, is never to be added as an afterthought. When his talent was discovered, he was posted as a draughtsman, but reassigned again after an anonymous memorandum, "Army Poster Propaganda," recommending the need for instructional posters was traced to him.

Eventually designing posters for the Army, Games took on subjects such as security, safety, health, hygiene, recruitment and training. After D-Day, in , he asked to rejoin his infantry unit but was refused as his work was considered essential to the war effort. Having made his name as a leading poster artist during the war, Games sought to revive his freelance career in peacetime.

In Games and Marianne moved to the house in north London, where they brought up their three children, and lived for the rest of their lives. There was a studio in the house, where Games worked on the Festival of Britain commission. He claimed that the famous red and white bunting was inspired by watching Marianne pegging the washing on to a line in the garden after the Festival Committee had asked for his original version of the logo to be made more festive.

Yet his passion was still for posters and Games continued to devise arresting advertisements for clients including the Financial Times, British European Airways, Guinness and the Royal Shakespeare Company. If ideas do not work when they are an inch high, they are never going to work.

Interested in works by Abram Games? Free info-services. Would you like to sell a work by Abram Games? Infos for seller. A young girl lies dead in a red coffin, her head visible through a cloud shaped window in the lid. Her coffin is gradually transformed into an arrow that points to the cause of her death - a 'blind' - in this case a grenade.

In the background, an explosion illustrates the tragic consequence of her misadventure. A line of text that is stamped at an angle across the image states, 'This child found a blind' and completes the composition by leading your eye back to the coffin.

Finally the entire design is underlined with two lines of bold text: one issuing a warning, 'Accidents occur daily with blinds left on ranges' and the other offering a solution, 'Report all blinds for destruction at the end of the day's work. Next, Games uses the basic shapes and colours of the images to communicate the message on a subconscious level.

Games always considered the effect of his designs when viewed from a distance. If ideas do not work when they are an inch high, they are never going to work. Games choice of colours, red, yellow and black for both images and text are also designed to sound the alarm as they are natural warning colours. Red is a universal symbol of danger, while the combination of yellow and black, both in nature and design, indicates a potential hazard.

Finally, Games uses a counterchange between the tones of the images and the graduated tones of their background to contrast and balance each component part of the poster.

When you first look at an Abram Games poster it is deceptively simple, but every element is carefully calculated to communicate the message on a variety of levels to a wide target audience. M any of Abram Games' designs are visual puns with several layers of meaning. They were influenced by the metamorphosis of images and ideas that he saw in Surrealist art , particularly in the work of Salvador Dali.

In 'Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach' , Dali creates a coherent image that conveys those fractures of time and place that we experience in the landscapes of our dreams: the landscape of sand and rocks become a table top with a bowl of fruit which is also a human face; the rocks in the foreground combine with the distant landscape to form a dog whose collar is the bridge that links them.

Dali's images are designed to unlock our subconscious and free our imaginations. It is the clarity of their technique and coherence of their composition that make them acceptable to our senses. What Abram Games realized was that this approach could also be applied to his posters to increase their interaction with their audience. Games' poster 'Use Spades - Not Ships' perfectly illustrates how he adapts Surrealist techniques to maximise the communication of his message.

His designs from this period have become iconic images that evoke the social history of their time.